Category: Research

Is your lawn crunchy? Mine is….?We?re in a serious situation right now,? says Tom Schwab, superintendent of the O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Schwab told me Monday that the Madison area was closing in on 50 days without significant rainfall and that turf grass can remain dormant for 60 to 75 days and recover the following growing season. At least that?s what the textbooks say.

Those white-, blue- and yellow-flowered plants popping up amid the dormant Kentucky bluegrass in parks and medians, for example, include Queen Anne?s lace, chicory and bird?s-foot trefoil, according to UW-Madison plant pathologist and turf specialist Jim Kerns and outreach specialist Eileen Nelson, who were nice enough to listen to my inexpert descriptions and play ?name that plant? with me. UW Extension turf specialist Doug Soldat said ?prairie-type plantings will remain greener longer than lawns,? but warned they require a lot of maintenance, don?t allow for the same types of human recreation, and ?should not be considered replacements for lawns.?

A: With another wave of dangerous heat upon us, it is of interest to consider how the last heat wave rates alongside other memorable heat waves. First of all, each day from July 4-6, Madison?s high temperature was more than 100 degrees with the 104 on July 5 ranking as third highest of all time. Moreover, we set record high temperatures for five consecutive days from July 2-6.

A: Depending on the ingredients, sunscreen works like a mirror or by sacrificing itself to the marauding rays of the sun. According to Yaohui “Gloria” Xu, dermatology professor at UW?Madison, the compounds in sunscreen come in two types: physical and chemical.

Two independent teams of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland made a surprising announcement early on the morning of July 4. The announcement: They had discovered a new particle, and it might help explain why things have mass….The University of Wisconsin-Madison played an important role as two Wisconsin scientists have been right on the front lines. Professors Sau Lan Wu and Wesley Smith, both in the UW-Madison physics department, played critical roles in designing the experiments and analyzing the data that led to the July 4 announcement.

Parents can play a key role in swelling the ranks of students pursuing careers in science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) fields, according to a new UW study published in Psychological Science. Increasing interest in STEM fields is crucial to developing a strong 21st century U.S. workforce, but interest in science and math begins to wane in high school when students choose not to take advanced courses in those subjects, according to the study.

Lead author and UW-Madison psychology professor Judith Harackiewicz said the study shows schools can encourage more participation in STEM courses by directly communicating options to parents.

At a moment in science history that many are hailing as one of the most important in a century, UW-Madison researchers were front and center, playing lead roles in a discovery that takes modern physics to the very edge of human understanding. Scientists from UW-Madison were deeply involved in figuring out the physics and building and operating the $10 billion machine used to discover a particle believed to be the so-called ?God particle,? responsible for giving matter mass and shaping the very early universe.

Wesley Smith, a UW-Madison physicist, has spent much of his career doing the physics and helping design the machinery that went into the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the giant European particle smasher that will make headlines around the world this week. Very early Wednesday morning, scientists from the collider are expected to announce that they have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that physicists say will fill a crucial and mystifying gap in our understanding of how the world is put together.

Noted: Which is why policy makers should flag a recent study that found more than three-quarters of patents from America?s top ten patent-producing universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the result of breakthroughs by immigrants. Those universities produced 1,466 patents?a fraction of the total awarded?but many were in such cutting-edge fields as information technology and molecular biology.

Sangtae ?Sang? Kim, the first executive director of the Morgridge Institute for Research, is leaving the organization at the end of the month ?to pursue new career interests and opportunities,? according to this UW-Madison news release posted Thursday. Nobody seems keen to elaborate beyond that, though. The main focus of the UW-Madison news release put out Thursday was to announce that James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry at UW?Madison and a co-founder of Third Wave Technologies, has been named interim executive director of the Morgridge Institute by its board of trustees.

The Morgridge Institute for Research at UW-Madison has a new executive director. James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry has been named the interim executive director, taking over for Sangtae “Sang” Kim, the institute?s first executive director, who is leaving the position at the end of June.

A new grant will help researchers at UW-Madison test a new class of diesel biofuels for nautical use. The Engine Research Center in UW?s College of Engineering received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to help develop a method of testing hydro-treated vegetable oil for ship and submarine engines. Rolf Reitz, director of the Engine Research Center, said the center?s six professors and a group of graduate students will work to develop a computer model that can accurately predict how certain blends of these fuels will perform in maritime engines.

A. Limestone is abundant in Wisconsin, and it?s the material of choice for the surface of gravel roads, and the base for roads paved with asphalt or concrete. Limestone contains calcium carbonate, often with a mixture of magnesium carbonate. When chunks of limestone abrade against each other, small particles called “fines” are created, said Craig Benson, chair of the departments of civil and environmental engineering and of geological engineering at UW-Madison.

A. A flood occurs when water flows into a region faster than it can be absorbed into the soil, stored in a lake or reservoir or removed in runoff or a waterway into a drainage basin. A flash flood is a sudden local flood characterized by a great volume of water and a short duration. It occurs within minutes or hours of heavy rainfall or because of a sudden release of water from the breakup of an ice dam or constructed dam.

A: The summer solstice (in Latin, sol, ?sun,? and stice, ?come to a stop?) is the day of the year with the most daylight. The first day of the astronomical Northern Hemisphere summer is the day of the year when the sun is farthest north (on June 20 or 21). In 2012, this occurs on June 20 at 6:09 pm CDT. As Earth orbits the sun, its axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees from its orbital plane. Because Earth?s axis of spin always points in the same direction ? toward the North Star ? the orientation of Earth?s axis to the sun is always changing.

A: It happens all the time, but almost all the time it?s on purpose. “It really depends on the type of animal,” said Keith Poulsen, a large animal veterinarian at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. “It?s very rare for birds to be obese, because they couldn?t fly anymore. “But plenty of animals end swimsuit season by gorging on anything they can find.

If there is one place any scientist would wish to be, chances are it would look a lot like the place where UW-Madison physicists Wesley Smith and Sau Lan Wu find themselves right now ? on the verge of discovery.

Jack Williams admits to being a bit uneasy with some of the headlines generated by a report he contributed to that was published last week in the journal Nature. ?Earth could reach devastating ecological tipping point by 2025,? blared a Slate.com post about the report.

?Some of the media reporting has fallen squarely into the angle of,’We’re going to die’– which is not my perspective and the point of the article,? says Williams, UW-Madison?s Bryson professor of climate, people and environment in the department of geography and the Nelson Institute?s Center for Climate Research. ?But there is a real but difficult-to-quantify risk of reaching and passing tipping points in the global ecosphere, and we are calling attention to that risk.?

Quoted: ?People who are homeless are under a lot of stress, and stress causes higher cortisol levels. Higher cortisol levels lead to weight gain,? said nutritionist Sherry Tanumihardjo of the University of Wisconsin, who has studied the hunger-obesity paradox but was not involved in this research.

In a 15-story building, in the middle of land-locked Wisconsin, a team of scientists waits for hurricane season. That?s when a multi-million dollar, unmanned aircraft will start flying from Wallops Island, Va., loaded up with a UW-Madison-engineered instrument to gather data from tropical storms off the Atlantic coast. “It’s sort of a mystery right now in our science community as to why hurricanes intensify or de-intensify,” said Chris Velden, a UW-Madison scientist working on the project. “We hope to get some information from this aircraft to be able to answer those questions.”